It’s Our “Freedom” They Hate — US Coalition Air Strikes Kill 77 Civilians, Including Children

On Monday, airstrikes, believed to be led by US coalition forces, killed 21 innocent civilians in Manbij’s northern Hazawneh quarter in Syria, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. On Tuesday, additional strikes in the region killed 56 more, including multiple children, according to Reuters.

Prior to the strikes on Tuesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights noted that more than 100 civilians have been killed in Manbij in only a short time — nearly half of them children.

The deaths of these innocent men, women, and children will, and likely already have been, written off as collateral damage in the war on terror.

The US military will claim that Islamic militants hide among the population to deliberately cause civilian casualties during coalition strikes. However, they conveniently ignore the fact that it is coalition bombs killing the civilians.

Prior to the assault on Syria from the west, Syria had vibrant, bustling marketplaces in the old cities of Damascus and Aleppo. The country boasted its own innovative IT industry despite economic sanctions imposed by the west.

Terror attacks were all but non-existent and the people certainly never feared bombs falling from the sky. However, all that changed after the ambitions of the military industrial complex became reality.

In depressing irony, the west continues to fail to realize the cause of terrorism. Americans, especially, continue to buy into the notion that the terrorists hate our freedom.

The mainstream media and politicians alike fail to ever mention blowback as the real cause of terrorism.

As Americans cower in fear over the perceived threat from men, women, and children attempting to escape ISIS from war-torn Syria, the majority of people are ignoring the reason there are refugees in the first place.

The US created and funded the terrorist regime in Syria that would be used to destabilize the region and create a specific advantage for American interests over China and Russia.

Prior to 2012, ISIS, as we know them, did not exist. So how did this unknown group of psychopathic killers gain such notoriety so quickly?

A plan to create and arm an active resistance to the Assad regime was put in place four years ago, and the result was a radical group of jihadists who, in turn, morphed into ISIS, all thanks to the United States.

These leaked Pentagon documents are not the only evidence that the United States created and aided ISIS either. Just last year, renowned journalist Seymor Hersh interviewed members of the DoD who confirmed the establishment knew about the monster they were creating but chose to conveniently ignore it. According to the report:

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’

But that’s not all. When Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter testified in a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee in December concerning the U.S. strategy for fighting ISIL, his inept attempt to keep knowledge of the ISIS oil convoy under wraps backfired in a most comical way. John McCain addressed the Defense Secretary in a state of facetious disbelief about the US-allowed and Turkish-protected oil routes from which ISIS earned a large portion of their funding:

“Secretary, you may want to correct the record. We all knew those fuel trucks were moving back and forth. We’ve seen them. We knew it. The decision was not made by the White House to attack them. I think you may want to correct the record,” he added, “because I certainly knew.”

But it doesn’t end there either. The US foreign policy of destabilizing the Middle Eastern region over past decades has led to resentment and hate toward the West. Subsequently, ISIS has no problem filling its ranks with the family members of the victims of the West’s brutal oppression in the region. As we reported last year, the United State’s foreign policy of drone warfare, killing thousands of children, has created a million Osama bin Ladens.

Veterans are also coming forward to confirm this notion. Saying he had “helped create ISIS,” an Iraq War veteran and US Marine bravely spoke out on his role in stoking the ISIS wildfire.

Former Marine Vincent Emanuele’s acknowledgment of responsibility comes in an article that was posted on TeleSUR’s English website, in which he hoped to answer the often raised question of “Where did ISIS come from?”

“I saw my fellow Marines kill innocent people, torture innocent civilians, destroying property, mutilating dead bodies, running over dead corpses, laughing and photographing people while doing so,” he said. “For me it was very simple. I sat there in Iraq and I asked myself ‘How would I behave?’ ‘What would I think if I was in the shoes of the Iraqi people?’”

“I vividly remember the marines telling me about punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I remember the tales of sexual torture; forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles, sometimes sodomizing them with batons,” wrote Emanuele.

“I knew what I was seeing was wrong, I knew it was immoral, I knew it was unjust, I knew it was illegal,” said Emanuele,“and I knew that we would pay severe consequences in the form of the blowback as we are seeing with groups like ISIS. I knew those things were going to happen back then just from being a self-conscious person.”

Only through educating ourselves and others about who is behind this theater of constant war and terror, will we ever begin to stop it. Continued dehumanization of Middle Eastern people and more war will only serve to fuel the flames of terrorism. It’s high time American citizens stand up and bravely say — no more war.

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Minds.